... Nige is onto something :Too Many People?
Given that there are those among environmentalists who think that nothing is wrong with Earth that the elimination of our species would not permanently improve, perhaps they should rethink their views of capitalism and consumerism.
Though related or not I'm not sure, it's amusing to see people criticise the intellectual infantilism of materialism as represented by, say, Richard Dawkins, but the moment someone points out that modern maonstream consumerist 'culture' is exactly an expression of that truth denying materialism, the same people rush to defend the materialism they think themselves to be opposed to. Showing that their beliefs are simply that, more or less abstract words in their heads, & the moment these ideas are actually extended into the actuality of life- from the laboratory of the mind into broader existence- they utterly fail to follow the connection. Watch a car advert on tv, with lowly consumers drooling over this heavenly product; that's Dawkins' materialism. The inane gameshows, juvenile entertainments- likewise applied materialism. Such self-imagined Dawkins opposers are simply inconsistent materialists, their opposition simply a more or less irrelevant matter of aesthetics in the area of belief systems. They think they can have their mammon & their God, naturally completely falsifying truth.
ReplyDeleteMethinks you are equivocating, in this case using the term materialism as if it meant the same in both instances. Philosophical materialism is not the same thing as a preoccupation with the acquisition, possession or use of material goods. One could object to the notion that the ultimate reality is matter and be quite content to make as much money as possible and spend it in all sort of flamboyant ways.
ReplyDeleteNow, I understand you detest TV adverts and the things the advertise - though you seem much more familiar with them than I; I haven't watched the tube in days. What I would like to know is how you think people should be spending their time and their money, or how you think they should live their lives, since you so evidently disapprove of how they do so. I trust my spending of good money on a concert of two Schubert symphonies last night meets your standard. Also my purchase of an 1894 first edition of Elihu Vedder's illustrated version of the Rubaiyat. Sybaritic me.